The objective of the show is for a man to gain a date with one of thirty single women. The women stand on stage underneath thirty white lights, each with a button in front of them. A single man is then brought on stage via the ‘Love Lift’ and tries to woo the women in a series of rounds, playing a prerecorded dating video, displaying a skill (such as dancing or playing a musical instrument), or playing another video in which the man’s friends or family reveal more about him. At any point during the rounds, the women can press the button in front of them to turn off their light (their area of the stage will turn red if they do so). If, at the end of three rounds, there are still lights left on, the bachelor will turn off all but two of the remaining lights himself. He will then have a chance to ask one question to the last two women, before choosing which woman he wants to go on a date with by turning off one more light. If the man is left with 2 lights at the end of round 3, then he will just ask his question to the two remaining women and if there is only 1 light left at the end of round 3 then he will go on a date with that girl without asking them his question.

For a while, I really enjoyed watching it. I got involved with the Tweeting and even had something I said retweeted by Leah (one of the 30 girls at the time) when I said she had a head like a fifty pence piece. I was being bitchy, but she seemed to take it in good humour, so it’s all good. I loved seeing the dates, mostly because (as was the curse of Blind Date) they’d usually get to their date destination and realise they had NOTHING to talk about (I have a morbid fascination for awkwardness, I think) and I even started to get to know the contestants who’d been hanging around dateless for a while. It seemed like Saturday night telly from when I was a kid – all that was missing was an hour of Gladiators beforehand!

 A couple of weeks ago, though, Husband made an small, innocuous comment that really got me thinking about the show and I’ve not watched it since because of it.  He said “Imagine if this show was the other way around?”

What he meant was, imagine if there were 30 blokes and one woman choosing instead.

At the moment, they have one lad come on at a time and the girls make salacious comments, pass judgement on the bloke, watch him perform like a circus animal in some cases and basically treat him like a piece of meat.

So. Imagine if it was the other way around. 30 men, sizing up a single girl, making her jump through hoops deciding whether or not she was good enough for them. Would you still watch it? Or would the whole situation not seem a bit intimidating, belittling, degrading?

Maybe I’m taking it all a bit too seriously – most of the people on the show are young, single, out for a good time and just want a chance of a free short break and to be on telly. In that respect, I get it, I do. But there is a real issue of inequality going on here. The format of the show is obviously very deliberate in that the man has to do the hard part so that it doesn’t seem distasteful or misogynistic, but what is it they say about the goose and the gander? Why is it okay for men to humiliate themselves but not women? Isn’t it funny how most people know the word ‘misogyny’ but far less know about ‘misandry’. **

I’ve written before about how equality goes both ways, or at least it should, and I think in this case the bosses of ITV need to drag themselves out of the dark ages. I can’t watch the show any more without having hallucinations where there’s 30 lionesses on stage fighting over one gazelle in a clown costume, it’s just too cringe-worthy.

What do you think? Am I taking it too seriously, or is this type of sexism a button-pusher for you too?

**Ironically, the WordPress dictionary didn’t even recognise that word…

(I’m linking this up with Mummy Barrow’s Ranty Friday Linky)

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I’m not even going to justify her pathetic jabs with any sort of specific rebuttal to the claims she’s made about us as a whole because I have another theory. This woman is well-documented as saying that she doesn’t have any friends and struggles with interpersonal relationships. I think her comments come from a sense of teeth-grindingly intense jealousy. When she attended BlogFest on Saturday, she will have seen hundreds of women, all from different places, all with different lives, different interests, with different amounts of money, different levels of education, coming together to spend time in a huge sisterhood. That’s gotta sting when you’re a friendless crone, right?

I came to this conclusion yesterday night. If you’ve read my previous post you’ll know that I spent a large chunk of yesterday in hospital. I came home and plugged my phone in (fucking iPhone battery, mutter mutter) to find texts, emails, wall posts, messages and group posts from no less than a dozen bloggers who I’ve come to know over the past two years. Offers of help, offers of ears to bend if I needed to. One of them even tried ringing the hospital I’d gone to, to see if they could find anything out, so worried they’d been at my unusual radio silence.

Friendship is something that a lot of us take for granted and although I’m not lucky enough to have all of these ladies living just around the corner from me, although I can’t pop round for a coffee if I have five minutes to spare, although I’ve never met a lot of them on a face to face basis, I know I have a community of women who are rooting for me. If I need a shoulder to cry on or a place to ask for a cheer of ‘good luck!’ before an interview, they’re there. I’ve seen my community do amazing things, help others out when they’re in genuine need and have nowhere else to turn and it’s a very nice feeling to know that they’d have my back if I needed them.

And that, as far as I’m concerned, is why the lonely She Who Shall Not Be Named has taken such umbridge. Jealousy, pure and simple. If only she’d been a bit nicer, she may have made some friends too.

Thanks everyone. You know who you are.

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1. Instead of taking care of another person, I’m doing a lot of sitting on my bum and eating crisps. It’ not good for my sanity or my waistline.

2. Daytime TV is truly, truly rubbish, but I can feel myself getting sucked in. I got all antsy today because I didn’t get to watch Jeremy Kyle.

3. Before, when the house was a dump, I had an excuse. “I’ve been running around after a 4 year old!” I’d cry. Now, it’s just me, wallowing in my own filth, which is so not a good look.

There’s definitely  an element of me being a lazy cow in there (obvs…) but I also blame my house. No, honestly, hear me out.

I have the smallest kitchen in the whole world. This means I have no space for a dishwasher, so dishes build up on the side and to compound this the ‘side’ is bloody tiny, so the kitchen looks condemnable after just one meal. I have a decent enough washing machine, but it’s LOUD and as our kitchen is basically just a sectioned off part of our living room, this is by no means convenient. Also, there’s no space for a dryer, so washing is an ordeal. I can only stick a load on when I can get it hung out, and living in England means that this is for about three and half weeks of the year. The rest of the time, it’s on clothes horses or sitting in piles which eventually smell like mould.

I’d absolutely adore one of these Bosch Washing Mashines from Appliances direct, which would be quieter, more efficient and look a damn-sight nicer too. I’d need an extension (or a new house…) before I got all of my other wishes, but this would be a start. ‘Cause let’s face it, there’s nothing worse that sitting down to watch Jeremy Kyle and not being able to hear it over the noisy washing machine!

A girl can dream, can’t she…?!

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However, just recently, there have been some things that I can’t gab about, either to readers or Real Life Friends, and it’s making me feel peculiar.

I’ve written before about how superstitious I am and how at times it’s felt like it’s taking over my life, walking along the street by myself, avoiding the cracks and saluting the magpies, but at the moment I’m under the curse of the jinx. There are things going on, both good and bad, and if I talk about them I might jinx them. I know how stupid that sounds, like by mentioning something I’m going to somehow change the course of future events, but it’s just the way my mind works. There’s logic in there somewhere – if I DON’T talk about it and anything goes wrong, I know I didn’t jinx it by talking about it, does that make any sense?

The problem with this is that I feel like I’m holding my breath. I’ve taken a deep breath in and I have no idea when I’m going to be able to exhale again. It’s a frustrating feeling that I don’t like very much. As a control freak, it’s not all that conducive to my usual way of doing things, you know? The stuff that’s going on is only partially in my control and it’s not that great for my frame of mind.

All I know is, once this week is over, I’ll know where I stand a little bit more and hopefully things will start to fall into our new version of normal. But until then, if you only get one-word answers out of me, don’t be too surprised!

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When I think about it, many of my memories centre around music. When I was 6, I remember watching my mum get ready for her evening bar  job, backcombing her hair and squeezing into some seriously tight Levis, listening to ‘Ride on Time’ by Black Box. Around the same time, my Mum started seeing my step-dad and I fell instantly in love with him when he let me have free reign over his record collection. I’d sit for HOURS on a Sunday afternoon putting on album after album, being oh-so-careful with the needle on the record player, listening to John Lee Hooker, Santana, Van Morrison, The Who, The Cure…he had so many records and it was such an amazing musical education.

When I was 10, I got a portable tape player and Mariah Carey’s Music Box album on TAPE, marking the beginning of my diva phase, where I’d sing at the top of my lungs to any number of female vocalists. However, at this time, I was just as likely to be listening to Guns ‘n’ Roses as I was to Whitney, my early education giving me extremely varied taste.

Skip forward a few hundred years, and I’m still as ‘into’ music as I ever was. I may not get quite as much time to listen to music as I once did, but it continues to be a passion. Today, I went to the shops in the car and stuck the radio on. Maybe it was the rain, but the reception on my usual Radio 4 was horrendous and the only station I could get was a local one which happened to be broadcasting the UK Top 40. Now, as a teenager, I would listen to the charts religiously, even committing the most low-tech of piracy, recording songs onto a tape as I listened! Sure, there were songs I disliked but there were more that I liked.

So why is it that, despite the fact that my taste in music has changed only slightly, I spent the drive home pulling this face:

Rather than just write off the whole chart based on the snippet I heard (about 5 songs) I thought I’d look into it a bit further. I looked up the current UK Top 40 and I can honestly say that there were only SEVEN songs that didn’t make my ears bleed. They are as follows:

Gerry and the Pacemakers - You’ll Never Walk Alone (obviously…)

Psy – Gangnam Style (Husband showed me this on YouTube WEEKS ago. We’re so ahead of the curve, I even have his album in my car already)

Pink – Blow Me One Last Kiss (I like Pink, she seems like a nice lady and her song was wholly inoffensive. Dunno if I’d buy it though)

Ne-Yo – Let Me Love You (Ne-Yo, like a far less aggravating Usher)

David Guetta (feat. Sia) – She Wolf (But only because I adore Sia)

Mumford and Sons – I Will Wait (Love Mumford and Sons. ‘Nuff said.)

Florence and the Machine – Spectrum (Say My Name) (Ol’ Flo has a cracking voice. And she’s a redhead)

So that’s it. Of the 40 songs, I like 7 – that means that 17.5% of the music chart is to my taste. I don’t know if I’m becoming more fussy or miserable as I get older but on more than one occasion, I’ve commented that Radio One sounds more like ‘noise’ than music. What I really don’t get is why everything has to sound the same. There doesn’t seem to be much that’s very unique, everything is vocoders, trance beats, bassy crescendos and samey hooks. It’s boring.

I know that with the advent of each new musical era, the older generation will condemn the new in favour of the old. My Grandad apparently banned my Mum from having Marc Bolan and David Bowie posters in her bedroom and I can only imagine what he’d say about Led Zeppelin, The Clash or Queen. But, I’m 28. I’m not ‘the older generation’ yet…am I? I feel very unsettled at the thought that I’m past the point where I’ll ever enjoy new music again and only listen to music that’s already happened. The feeling that there’s nothing new that will excite me any more is honestly terrifying. I know I can wait for the next Foo Fighters album and I’ll be happy again, but they’re a band I already like.

Is it just me who feels this way? Am I being really short-sighted? Can you recommend any good artists that I may not have heard?! Let me know!

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But he’s getting on my nerves.

So far this week, we’ve heard him doing voices in Despicable Me, Over the Hedge and Horton Hears a Who. It’s not an over-saturation problem as such, like with certain celebs. Like how, a few years ago, I got genuinely so sick to the back teeth of seeing Johnny Depp in EVERYTHING Tim Burton did. I know he’s good and all that, but I’m bored with him now. No. It’s because I have to try to work out a way to explain to Sausage why Gru, Hammy and Ned McDodd the Mayor of Whoville all sound the bloody same, without ruining the magic for her!

As far as I’m concerned, big Hollywood actors should be allowed to do a voice over for ONE iconic children’s character and that’s it. EVER.

It’s like the superhero paradox. Let’s use the awesome Hugh Jackman as an example. Hugh Jackman IS Wolverine. If he showed up in a different superhero film playing a different character, the world would implode. That’s simple, basic physics for you.

When we heard rumours of a Captain America movie, I immediately thought that Aaron Eckhart would have made a brilliant Steve Rogers (if maybe a tad old), but it doesn’t matter. He was already Harvey Dent and that’s a parallel that just should not be crossed.

Sausage is a huge Octonauts fan and the other day we were watching a new show on Cbeebies and a character had the same voice as Peso. Luckily, she’s 4 and willing to suspend her disbelief but, as far as she’s concerned, Peso is not just a series of cells, coloured in by an overworked animator in some Canadian studio, he’s a real penguin, driving around the oceans in an eight-armed super-sub who puts real sunscreen on real albino humpback whales and is real-life pals with a real ginger-pirate-cat. STOP RUINING THIS FOR HER.

It’s making me want to go lioness on all of these dumbasses who are spoiling my child’s innocence. I know kids have to grow up and learn the realities of the world at some point, but that should be a decision that me and Husband get to make, not Andy bloody Peters (isn’t he King of the BBC?).

So yeah, as much as I love him:

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1. People Who Get To The Till at the Supermarket Then Act Surprised That They Have To Pay.

Okay, long-winded title which more or less explains itself, but what the merry FUCK is it with people who do that? You’re in a shop. Unless you plan on committing petty larceny, the chances are you’ll be paying once your goods are rung up. So why oh WHY do people wait until every last item is put away and the checkout operator is looking at them with keen expectancy do these numpties only then get their purse or wallet out. And don’t even get me started on Nectar cards/Clubcards/Advantage cards. I’m so sick of getting stuck behind some tit in a trance who contributes towards making my life at least 10% less efficient.

Look at my filthy flap.

2. Dirty Flaps.

Yep, I hate it when my flaps get dirty.

Okay, so I mean the flaps on the top of my bins. We have two bins, side by side in the kitchen, one for recycling, one for everything else (when the council bother to deliver red sacks, but that’s a different rant entirely) and no matter how many times a day I wipe them down, they always seem to be covered in schmutz. I don’t know what the solution is, but it hacks me off.

3. Discounts That Aren’t Really a Discount.

Last week, Husband took me out to buy me a new laptop and we went to our local PC World as it had a closing down sale on. I found a laptop I wanted which was an ex-display model and seemed to have a really good amount chopped off. Then the salesman came over and, Zombie Jesus bless him, he was very honest and told us that the original price of five hundred and something was only charged for about a week and that it was really worth £299. Right, so let me get this straight. The laptop was only ever worth £299 and has been on display for six months and you’re still charging £269 for it? Jog. On. £30 off for having a million sausage-fingered morons stabbing at it every time the shop opened? Nuhthanks….

4. Bad Drivers.

I know I blogged about this one before, but the fuckwittery I’ve encountered seems to be worsening. The other day, I was driving through a car park and stopped to let a person back out of a disabled space and the person behind me tried to overtake and almost ploughed into the side of the car backing out. I mean, really? Was that bloke in SUCH a rush that he needed to take that risk? I also had a grown man literally screaming out of the window at me while I had Sausage in the car for not pulling out quick enough (just for the record, I pulled out  plenty quick enough). What possesses grown people to behave this way?

Yeah. Course you were…

 5. Bourgeois Bigotry.

I’m not the biggest fan of the Olympics, it has to be said, but when twats like Aiden Burley MP start going on about the opening ceremony (which, incidentally, was absolutely bloody brilliant and I’m SO proud to have a director like Danny Boyle as part of British culture) being “too multicultural”, what they’re really saying is “go home, darkies”, without  actually having the balls to come out and say it. All I will say is, our opening ceremony would have been extremely drab and boring had we not Caribbean, Asian, African and all those other cultural influences mixed in to this melting pot of a country. Keep your veiled racism, it’s unpleasant and cowardly.  Oh and also, Aiden, you twat – the Rolling Stones are blues musicians – where do you think blues comes from? Black America, maybe? So you like multiculturalism when it’s served up to you by four fellas from Kent?

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I finished the course, passed, and enrolled on more as soon as I could. I started two at the same time, one a 60 pointer and another a short course worth 15 points. As often happens, life got in the way and I decided to quit the 60 point course and finish the short course before taking a break. I’ve done various things between then and now, working for myself, being a lady of leisure, working in a couple of offices, but it’s always been a niggly thing in the background, my unfinished degree so I made the decision to try to get it done.

I went to the OU site, chose a module, registered and waited for the forms to turn up. When I started the degree a 60 point course was, on average, between £650 and £750. This new course I want to do? £2500. And it seems all of the courses have gone up by that much. So, that means that from beginning to end instead of costing between £3900 and £4500, that very same qualification will now cost  around £15,000. Put simply, the cost has almost tripled.

Now, were my household income below the threshold or we were in receipt of certain benefits, I’d get the full amount paid for me. As it stands, I’d get a partial award of around £600 towards my course fees, so I’d still need to find about £1900 for the rest of it.

I’m not saying that I think I’m entitled to a free education, but I really feel like the message is all wrong here.

For a start, I’m 28. Not everyone wishing to embark on a degree is a grown up, most are 18, fresh out of sixth form or college and looking to improve their life prospects. This means that either they take student loans and get themselves in a ton of debt (really not what we should be encouraging, in light of our current economy), work while studying and put more pressure on themselves, or turn to their parents who’ll need to find several thousand pounds to pay for the education, not to mention food and shelter for their children. I feel sorry for anyone with more than one kid at this point.

The fact is that by increasing the fees by this much, the majority of ‘average’ people are simply unable to afford to better themselves. £600 is a help, but I simply don’t have a spare £3800 a year, which means I just can’t complete my course. I have no choice but to remain incomplete, no way of increasing my earning potential, a vicious circle if you will.

All I know is, as much as I try to stay away from politics on this blog, I’m genuinely despairing of this government. It’s patently obvious to anyone who takes the time to notice that the Tories are doing everything they can to keep the ‘lower’ classes in their place (menial labour and servitude, I’m guessing?) by depriving them of a chance to education and we’re just letting them do it.

I’m not condoning the riots, but the people who were rioting were doing so because they felt disenfranchised and abandoned by their country. That was a relatively small group but one by one, the Tories are managing to make other social groups feel that same level of frustration and abandonment. I hate to think what will happen if that, much larger, group decides to take matters into their own hands to make themselves feel listened to.

Welcome to Tory Britain.

Welcome to the Middle Ages.

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The one, very slight, downside to this is that since I last had a car, everyone else on the road seems to have turned into a MASSIVE TWAT.

I passed my test at 18 and have worshipped at the altar of my driving licence ever since. I adore being able to drive, it gives me such a sense of freedom and independence. We had a car right up until just before Sausage was born, but the house we moved to didn’t have a parking space, so we went pedestrian for a while, with a brief ownership of what turned out to be a money pit on wheels somewhere in the middle.

So I’ve been without a car for roughly three years, but the world seems to have changed a lot in that time. I’ve been back on the road for about a month and I don’t think I’ve been cut up, pulled out on, tail-gated, sworn at and been generally victim to a lot of fuckwittery as I have in that very short space of time. People’s level of patience seems to have diminished exponentially.

Just last week, I was in Waitrose car park and I stopped to let someone pull out of a disabled space, right outside the shop. Instead of waiting patiently, the massive tank-like vehicle behind me decided to pull around me aggressively and at some speed and almost drove into the side of the car pulling out. He didn’t even have the grace to look embarrassed, he just reversed a bit and sat there swearing.

Another example; on our way to Lakeside on Monday for my birthday shopping trip, there are some quite extensive road works going on along the main A-road that takes us there, and not only have the lanes been split up by cones and temporary markings, the speed limit has been reduced. I was driving in the correct lane to take me to my destination, at the 40mph speed limit. Some absolute knob-case in a big white van decided to sit with his front bumper almost to my rear one, flashing his lights and waving his hands.

Yes. I was in the right-hand lane.

Yes, under normal circumstances, that’s the overtaking lane.

But on this day, it wasn’t the lane for overtaking, it was the lane that had been marked off to go in one particular direction. As SOON as the road works ended, this guy did a really dangerous undertaking manoeuvre and sped off, whilst making aggressive gestures through the window.

The problem with all of this is that it makes be unbelievably cross. I know you could argue and say that this anger makes me no better than the perpetrators, but you know how everyone has a button that you can push that makes them angrier than almost anything? This is one of mine. The lack of manners and patience combined with the fact that in both situations, I was doing the right thing, makes me want to kick puppies**

I know I’m naive to think that if everyone behaved nicely, we’d all get on a lot better. There will always be twats on the road, but why does it suddenly seem worse? Maybe it’s my inner lioness, the fact that they’re doing this when I have Sausage in the car makes it worse because they’re endangering her. All I know is, I’m going to have to learn some techniques to help me with my own rage because driving along, preoccupied with someone elses mistakes is liable to make me make my own mistakes and that’s a risk I just can’t take.

Do you suffer with road rage? If so, how do you deal with it?

**I would never EVER kick a puppy. I’m just trying to illustrate how mad I get.

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Me – “Is the gravy in the bag?”

(anyone who does KFC properly knows the importance of the gravy)

Woman – “Yeah, it’s in the box”

————————————————————

Get home.

No gravy.

None.

Me -

.gif courtesy of Uncyclopedia. Rights belong to whoever it was who made Scanners…

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